AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Accelerate Migrations to AWS with Tech Mahindra and AWS Application Migration Service
By Dinakaran Rajendran – Cloud Solution Architect, Tech Mahindra
Gary Emmerton – Senior Solution Architect, AWS
Geetha Elliott – Senior CSM, AWS
Nirav Bhatt – Database Migration Consultant, AWS
Nitin Chahar – Principal Partner Solution Architect, AWS
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| Tech Mahindra |
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Introduction
When customers migrate to the cloud, they need the assurance that migration of their business-critical applications can be achieved with minimal down-time, using proven tools and methodologies. This blog explains the approach and experience of migrating a customer’s global eCommerce application to AWS, and how it was achieved successfully over one weekend. We will also share how the customer, Tech Mahindra, and AWS Professional Services (ProServe) collaborated in executing a successful migration journey.
The customer, RS Group plc, a global product and service solutions provider for industrial customers headquartered out of the UK, had ambitious plans to migrate out of their existing on-premises data centres to the cloud within a constrained timeframe.
Tech Mahindra is a consulting and technology solutions provider that currently holds eight AWS competencies, including the Migration Consulting Competency, demonstrating their extensive experience in cloud migrations. This experience led to Tech Mahindra being selected by the customer to lead the migration from the customer’s existing on-premises data centres to AWS.
AWS ProServe is a team of experts dedicated to helping customers realise the full potential of AWS services and ensure smooth migrations. AWS ProServe engaged with both the customer and Tech Mahindra throughout the migration to provide the latest guidance regarding migration best practices, architecture, and security, ensuring that the migration plan would meet the customer expectations and could be successfully delivered by Tech Mahindra.
Scope and Background
The customer needed to move all their existing workloads, including their global eCommerce platform, from their existing on-premises data centres to AWS. The workloads were a combination of commercial off the shelf (COTS) applications and in-house developed components with extensive integrations both internally and with business partners.
The customer’s eCommerce application serves their global markets and is a prime source of revenue and therefore the key drivers for the migration of this specific workload were minimising the required down-time and risk to the application.
The customer’s move to the AWS Cloud is to facilitate their strategy of increasing agility and innovation within their business, providing them with a stable and resilient foundation and access to the latest AWS services for modernising their business systems.
The Challenge
The eCommerce application consisted of hundreds of physical and virtual servers in the on-premises environment, with terabytes of data.
Breaking the application down into smaller groups and migrating each over a different migration window was considered as an option to mitigate risk. The analysis identified quickly that this approach increased the risk of problems due to the many inter-dependencies within the application and the complexity that this would add to the migration. A single cutover approach was also investigated. The Figure 1 illustrates the high-level considerations for a single cutover or a multi-move group cutover.
Figure 1 – High-level considerations for a single cutover and a multi-move group cutover
Stakeholders agreed that the lowest risk approach was to cut-over the entire application over a single weekend change window. The multiple-move group cutover was discounted because most components of the application, including those still on-premises and those already migrated, would require re-configuration each time a new move group was migrated, increasing considerably the effort, complexity and therefore the likelihood of problems.
The time constraints involved meant that a ‘lift and shift’ migration approach was agreed upon between Tech Mahindra and the customer. This approach, which minimises the change to the existing workloads because of the migration, was chosen as it reduced the likelihood of delays to the project. Once the migration was complete, the process of modernisation and rationalisation of applications would then commence.
Migration Journey
The approach for the migration consisted of the following stages:
1. Assessment and Planning – Tech Mahindra worked closely with the customer’s application owners to analyse each application to understand in minute detail the components and the inter-dependencies between them. From this Tech Mahindra created a migration treatment plan unique to each workload. The size and complexity of some of the business-critical applications required careful planning with the customer’s technology teams, and Tech Mahindra’s detailed analysis of the application estate and then validation back with the customer to ensure completeness.
2. Migration Strategy – Based on the assessment, Tech Mahindra then created a robust migration plan outlining the timeline, phasing of different workloads, dependency mapping and associated migration risks. AWS ProServe helped validate the plan, identify risk mitigations, and plan testing strategies.
3. Application Migration – With the detailed migration plan was in place, Tech Mahindra undertook the migration using AWS Application Migration Service (MGN) and native application tooling to successfully migrate all workloads to AWS. The success of the migration was proven by business-critical workloads such as eCommerce being able to move to business-as-usual support after only 2 days (originally planned early life support for 2 weeks) due to no major issues being reported and the application running smoothly.
4. Testing and Validation – As part of the earlier application discovery, the customer business application owners updated their existing detailed application testing and validation plans to be used as part of the migration execution. These tests were carried out as part of every workload and refined through each environment (Testing, Pre-Production, Production) for that workload.
High Level Solution Overview
The migration solution was built around the AWS MGN to carry out replication of on-premises server disk data to AWS and then facilitate the cutover.
Figure 2 – Migration Sequence leveraging AWS MGN
The main phases of the migration for the eCommerce application are described below:
- The AWS Application Migration Service (MGN) agent was installed on the on-premises servers.
- The MGN agent installation immediately started the process of continuous block level replication to staging disks in the customer’s AWS accounts. This took several weeks due to the size of the source disks and data, with the existing Production servers continuing to operate without interruption.
- All communication between the source servers and AWS, including data replication, is encrypted using TLS by default. AWS MGN supports encryption of data both in-transit and at-rest. You can encrypt the EBS volumes using your own encryption keys for data at rest after migration.
- Once the disks for all servers in the application were fully replicated, a test cutover took place to a validation environment.
- This enabled foundation infrastructure validation in an isolated environment without impacting the existing Production application. AWS MGN supports isolation at both the network and operating system level during the migration process.
- At the network level, AWS MGN uses TLS encryption for data transfer between the source servers and AWS. You can further secure access using security groups and VPNs.
- At the operating system level, AWS MGN creates independent Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) of each source server. This ensures the migrated servers are isolated from each other at the OS level.
- Once infrastructure testing was complete, functional, integration and performance testing commenced. This was still isolated to components in the validation network, with no interaction with systems outside of this migration wave.
- Following successful testing, the Security Groups (SGs) and Network Access Control Lists (NACLs) were updated to allow communication with customer systems.
- Management tooling was updated, and DNS was updated to the new application IP addresses.
- Full functional and integration testing with external components now took place with business owners and application SMEs.
- Based on test results, all stakeholders were involved in ‘Go/No-Go’ meetings to agree whether to move forward, fix-forward for minor issues or roll-back in the event of major issues.
Ultimately the customer’s eCommerce application was migrated successfully over a single weekend, involving cutting over hundreds of servers from on-premise to AWS, and was on-line ready for the start of the business day in New Zealand.
Customer Benefits
The collaboration between Tech Mahindra and AWS ProServe resulted in a successful migration for the customer, who now realises the immediate benefits of:
- Flexibility to scale up or down their compute capacity to match demand within minutes.
- Resilience provided by deploying components in multiple Availability Zones within an AWS Region.
“The partnership with AWS & Tech Mahindra helped us to deliver one of the largest IT transformations within RS, which resulted in the successful delivery of a non-disruptive programme of change. Given the velocity of the migration from on-premise to cloud, we had steep learnings on both sides but came together as one team, with a single purpose to deliver a non-disruptive programme of change. Migrating to the cloud has been the largest single IT transformation for the business. It enabled us to unlock the benefits of cloud computing, and is a key driver in helping future-proof the business and stay competitive.” Andrew Golds, Head of Cloud Engineering, RS Group PLC
A major part of the customer’s desire to move to cloud was to enable a program of modernisation of their workloads, which would have been challenging in a on-premises environment. As a result of the move to AWS the customer has commenced that program of modernisation with the goals of:
- Further reducing costs through right-sizing
- Reducing technical debt by moving to cloud native application architectures
- Opportunities to innovate faster with the latest AWS Services
- Increasing automation
Tech Mahindra now operates as an extension of the customer architecture and Cloud Center of Excellence teams, working side by side to provide benefits to the customer’s business.
Conclusion
This customer migration, led by Tech Mahindra, serves as a compelling example of how AWS partners can work seamlessly with customer and AWS teams to provide a comprehensive and successful migration journey. With the right expertise, planning and guidance, businesses can migrate and then leverage the full potential of the AWS cloud.
If your business is considering a cloud migration, partner with AWS and our network of trusted partners like Tech Mahindra. Your path to the cloud can be as successful as this customer’s journey, with the combined abilities of AWS and our expert partners by your side.
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Tech Mahindra – AWS Partner Spotlight
Tech Mahindra is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and MSP that specializes in digital transformation, consulting, and business re-engineering solutions.